Blorum.info: A blog+forum for Intermediates and experts. This blog is a discussion, often with myself, about how the digital media industry functions. Since you've wandered in, feel free to share some thoughts as comments on the blog. You might find a few insights. Please share a few too.

Saturday, May 31, 2008

I fall into bad habbits, even in terms of what I read. People is a waste of my time. It's like junk food. I sometimes read it and almost always wish I hadn't.

I'm trying to improve my online reading habbits by moving towards having a list of very high quality sources that I read. Two are about technology, one picks great education sites. I'll probably update this to a list of ten.

Friday, May 30, 2008

Thank you John Chow and DatMoney. I thought I would try your trick of riding on John Chow's coat-tails. As you suggested, I have never been to Mr. John Chow's blog but I do hope that this post, about John Chow's blog, will grant me large volumes of interested blog readers. Hopefully, not too disappointed to not be at John Chows blog but instead, to be at the best intermediate level online marketing blog about learning seo on the web.

Well, maybe not the best. One of the best. Thanks again Dat Money for you j chow, i mean john chow test idea.--------------Postscript - John Chow turns out to be a real person, or this is a more complete charade than I had imagined. His blog got banned from google. I'm still looking at how to learn to promote my sites better. I'm hoping that the class in blogging will help. del.icio.us

One of my colleagues, studying and learning about SEO, asked me about keyword density. He'd been speaking to an SEO expert who talked about his great results by focusing on 4.5% (or something) keyword density. He wanted to know what my opinion was.

My opinion is that it's bunk. Or at least, learning about and focusing on something like keyword density, is a million miles away from my understanding of and approach to placing well in the search engine. It's technical and finicky and dumb to interest.

I take the view that google has a constantly shifting algorithm. And to figure out what to do, start by trying to put yourself in google's shoes. How does Mr Google decide who to rank for a given term?

First, google looks for pages that are relevant which are pages that use that term alot. Say the term was "learning games", google starts by finding pages that talk about learning games. Specifically, gooogle considers (in this order);- Do incoming links to that page use "learning games" as anchor text?- Is the page's title: "learning games"?- Is "learning games" in the URL, particularly in the domain name?

Then,- are there H1 and H2 titles that are "learning games"?- Are there at least a few uses of the term "learning games" on the page? Lets guess that google gives you top marks for this criteria if you have between 1% and 8% keyword density on the page. Below 1%, you might not really be about learning games. Above 8%, it's probably a stuffed spammy page.- Do the links to your page come from pages that are full of learning games?- Does your site in general have lots of learning games?- Are other terms, that are statistically and semantically linked to learning games, such as "an educational game", showing up in on the page, on the domain, on the pages and domains from which your links come from, and on the pages that this page points to.

My point is this. For relevancy, there is no magic percentage that is better than another. The difference between a keyword density of 3.4% and 5.3% makes no logic as a focal point for google's ranking or for an SEO's effort. It might have worked but going forward, it can't be part of the plan.....

After finding some relevant pages, google then ranks them by links. They count the links. Do all links count and do they all count the same? That folks, is a story for another day

This is my $.02 on understanding and learning and educating myself about SEO. And my effort at promoting what I care about: learning, education, fun, and games. Like this one. Learning & teaching seo. del.icio.us

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Prevailing "SEO wisdom" is that you should make sure to have the http://www.domain.com/ and http://domain.com/ directed to each other to concentrate your link power. I was just looking at how we might accomplish this. It's a little more complicated than it sounds.

(1) Use .Net technology to globally route any incoming request that doesn't have the "www" in front of it to the corresponding http://www.time4learning.com/ page. The issue with this approach is that .Net only handles ".aspx" pages. Since our site has both ".html" and ".aspx" pages we would have to configure the hosting platform to route ".html" pages through the .Net pre-processor. The pages would be rendered the same way as normal HTML pages, the downside is that we may experience a slowdown of page delivery as the ".html" pages would now be going through a pre-processing stage instead of just being served up. This would also put an additional load on the server. At this time, I do not know how significant are these issues. This option can be easily turned "on" and "off", so if there are problems, we can certainly address them quickly.

(2) Currently our main web account at Verio is "time4learning.com", this is technically where the website is hosted. Requests to "www" are handled by this domain. Verio is suggesting that we can create another website domain, specifically called http://www.time4learning.com/ copy our current time4learning.com site over to the new http://www.time4learning.com/ and then very easily re-route any traffic coming to "time4learning.com" to "www". Unfortunately, we cannot do the reverse. This option is not easily turned "on" or "off" and may require some downtime while we copy the site over and make sure everything is working. The issue is that once we create a "www" site, traffic will start to flow to it, so we have to carefully plan this type of move. Ultimately, this is probably the more correct of the options, but certainly carries some element of risk via downtime. The downtime can be managed to a minimum.

Dear readers, what would you do? I'm willing to pay for a real answer to this question. Contact me for details. (this is revised) del.icio.us

Here's the idea. I'm involved with a site thats really good at teaching vocabulary to non-English speakers. It is highly placed on google for the words Build Vocabulary. Recently, it occurred to me that many of the people that might want to learn English might not speak English !!!!!

Maybe, for instance, they speak Spanish and might do a websearch in Spanish. So I wrote a page in English about our site and paid a nice bilingual lady to translate it into Spanish and to create some visibility for this page in Spanish-language directories, forums, websites, and blogs. She took my money, gave me a page, and reported that she had the page listed on 25 Spanish sites. She was sweet. I paid her. (In fact, I had her do this same activity on two sites. Check out: Estudiar desde casa - Habla espagnol? un programa conveniente de educación)

Then, I waited for this page in Spanish to start producing amazing numbers as an entry page from natural search. Nada.

So I consulted my google webmaster tools to see if those links were in high visibility places. I couldn't find any links to my Spanish page. And, el senorita stopped answering my emails or phone calls. merda

I'm a pretty impressively smart manager, aren't I? stupido.

So now, I'm back to creating some visibility (ie links) myself to:

1. Get some links and some traffic.

2. See if Spanish links get tracked the same way as English ones. So I've built the one link from this page and with a Spanish-speaking senorita that I know and trust (ie, my fiancee), we'll get that page listed in some Spanish directories. Then see if it appears in the usual webmaster tools.

3. I'm also wondering if someone with multinational multilingual SEO experience will show up and explain some basics to me. Please. I have attended SES Latin America in Miami twice, don't I deserve to know?!?
Por favor.....

Friday, May 16, 2008

I just posted this on the Regnow forum. I wonder if they'll delete. Regnow is an affiliate program (like a little commission junction) which I'm using on my build vocabulary site.

I have a question. I just set up this year as an affiliate and I'm on a payment schedule which works like this. Earn money in February, get paid 2 months later which means that it is sent at the end of April. In short, I'm still waiting for the bank deposit on my earnings from February. (It's May 16th as I write this)

Is there any way to expedite this? I had missed this detail of payment timing when I signed up and of course, as I look at using Regnow more broadly across my sites, this is big issue. And just for clarity, this isn't a question of meeting the minimum threshold for a payment, it's just the logistics of how my account is set up.Is there any way to expedite this?

What I didn't say is that compared to Google, who pays as soon as you hit the threshold, this program stinks. I've told the one partner that I use it with and he's promised to shift to another program soon. del.icio.us

Thursday, May 15, 2008

OK. So I slink off to learn the ins and outs of writing a .... policy ....... on privacy, completely unsure of what the heck I am doing. As I often do, I turn to my buddy Google and ask "How do I create a privacy policy?" and my buddy replies , "Check out this Privacy Policy Generator!"

So I do.

This thing is pretty cool. I filled in some information about the company policies and hit a button and up popped a perfectly legal privacy policy! In less than 10 minutes I had our privacy policy up and now I am free of dread..... until the next assignment.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

One of the projects that we've never faced up to was the installation of webanalytics. There were a number of reasons for this chief including we didn't know how to do it and we didn't want to do it wrong. Plus, once installed, it creates a lot of opportunity to analyse and improve things (ie a lot of work) which we didn't really have the staff for. So we postponed it until now.

Once we decided we had to do it this quarter, we started looking a bit more energetically for some staff to help. And we got lucky. Enter Zib. She seems to know her stuff. And she's implemented and used Google Analytics before. I was a little worried since she's used to working as part of a deep highly skilled team and I'm not always sure that our inhouse staff can do everything that needs to be done.

So far, everythings great. We're cleaning up old tracking codes, installing new ones, defining "goals" to track etc etc and it looks like, we'll be analyzing the performance of all of our ads, sales funnels, landing pages, and whatnot before the end of the month.

Sunday, May 11, 2008

I read alot on the web. Most of it is a rehash of other stuff. Google encourages alot of writing so there's endless rehashing. Think of this as content.Much of it says: Get a dmoz link blah blah blah blah and pay for a yahoo link blah blah blah blah.Are these links any more valuable than any other link at this point? I would think not but have not done any scientific testing. I would suspect that as far as YAHOO is concerned, the Yahoo listing will send some traffic but will not otherwise influence the other engines in any special ways.